


On burying your hands in dirt and coming out cleaner

by stardustlovers



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 15:53:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4143630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustlovers/pseuds/stardustlovers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannah Abbott had not been born to be a hero. She knew that.</p>
<p>Hannah was not a hero,but she could still play her part in the wars to come.</p>
<p>A character study of Hannah Abbott,a girl who knew bravery wasn't the only way to win a war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On burying your hands in dirt and coming out cleaner

Hannah Abbott had not been born to be a hero. She knew that. She would never excel in the first line of combat, would never wear a shining armor and there would never be songs about her heroic deeds. She cried too easily,her hands were too soft for wielding a sword,her words were too kind to command an army. But Hannah was great with people,she could read their words and expressions,could always tell when they needed a hug,a shoulder to cry on or just a silent room. Hannah was not a hero,but she could still play her part in the wars to come.

During her Transfiguration OWL, she tried to transfigure a ferret and got a flock of bright pink flamingos.When she ran put of class,she was followed by a Neville with pockets full of neatly folded gum wrappers who sat with her by the lake and gave her some mint-flavored gum,and who told her stories about the giant squid and Hogwarts founders.

She had seen this boy,talked to him even,in Herbology and in the Great Hall,and she thought about how Neville tried,and tried and tried until he got things right. He danced alone to learn the steps for the Yule Ball and then spun Ginny around the room as if he was a natural. He knew that the journey mattered.She thought about a boy that was afraid but fought nonetheless,a boy that hardly believed in himself but had so much potential. He wanted to make his parents proud. Hannah understood that.

A few weeks into her 6th year,Hannah's mother was killed.They did not think of an easy way to tell her that.There is no easy way. Hannah was pulled out of class and sent home for the year.This was the year she spent mourning. This was the year she lived in her house,with her father and the ghost of a memory that haunted every empty room.

When Hannah heard of Slughorn,she knew she would not have been chosen to his club. Hannah had been called a puff,a spare,called boring,called all these things she were not. She was tired of having people dismissing her,because her blood was not pure,because she was cautious, because she dared to cry and to mess up sometimes.

When Hannah saw Marietta with SNEAK written across herself,she felt like punching Hermione. They were just children trying to fill in shoes that were to big for them. She would remind others of this as they taught children how to fight in the room of requirement.

Hannah cared more than Ginny, but then Ginny had no mercy left. She had been stripped out of it at eleven. Ginny would fight for these children, defend, teach, die for them even, but she would never pity them. Ginny was done with pity.Pity is the feeling that feasts while talking about the starving,and Ginny had spent her whole 1st year starving.

But after all this,courageous screams and fights against death eaters,after standing tall against the Carrow brothers,after helping so many in the room of requirement,Hanna would still feel her rib cage become too full,her lungs too big for her own body,her heart too hurt to be silent. She would let herself melt in tears,let herself sob,flood her pillow in nights of ugly crying over the war.

She would feel like not getting up. She would feel guilty,feel sorry,feel angry and mostly, she would feel scared.

There would be nights when she shut curtains and climbed into her bed at Hogwarts,her fingers tracing down dozens of scars in her pale skin,her frailly body trembling under the cold touch: A cruciatus curse that should’ve end up on a 6th year Hufflepuff,a ugly scar in her ribs meant to harm a 1st year Ravenclaw,the words I must not tell lies carved deep in her hands,raw meat and dried blood in her limbs.

She would drag herself to take a shower,over and over and over,and sometimes Lavender would find her,crying under the hot running water,curled up in a ball in the floor at 3 am.Lavender,with her kind hands and sharp words,would drag her out,would wrap her body against a towel,would comb her hair in silence until they both could breath.

“The thing,Hannah,is that bravery is not pretty all the time. Bravery is this,is crying over children left fatherless, over yourself being motherless,over the spells and curses your body couldn’t stop,over the missing people and common graves. This,Hanna, this is not a series of murders,this is a war. And we must keep fighting.”

They would win this war,but they would loose so much.

Hanna would shake under the classmate hands,would climb into the friends bed in the Griffindor dorms because she could not sleep alone. There would be silence somedays,but rage filled screams the other,her anger resonating against the blood stained corridors.

"It’s not that we were not willing to die but that we were lucky enough not to",she would say,years after the war to the kids in Hogwarts wards,over tea and calming drought. There would always be work to be done. But for now,for now this was war,this was hiding after curfew to mourn the dead as much as the living.

Some nights,she went weeping to the greenhouse, hours past bedtime,to dig her pretty little fingernails in the dirt,remind herself that beautiful things,too,could be buried,that the ground was not only for corpses.

In one of those nights,Neville was there. She would look at him,his bright green eyes under red,puffy eyelids,his hands filled with rose thorns.

“Han."He said,his green eyes beaming at her.He would plant muggle seeds against magical ones, charm them so they would always grow,so there would be always life in those grounds.

"You should've been in Hufflepuff.",she told him.

"I wanted to",he said,and then proceeded to tell her how he knew fairness,knew tolerance,knew hard work and dedication,but he did not know brave.

"No,Neville,you are braver than you think you are.",she said,and Neville smiled and then told her she ought to be a Griffindor.

"No,Neville,bravery is only one way to fight. There is also healing, fairness,dedication,there are also several things that are not bravery. And this, what they are doing,what You-know-who and the Carrows and all of them are doing,this is not bravery,this is merely bravado,Neville."

After the war, Hannah stayed. She was not alone. Hermione was there to redo the year she had lost fighting,Mandy Brocklehurst was there to conqueer her dream of being Minister on either side,others to learn how to breathe again. Hannah felt the absence of people,but she told the first years stories and smuggled them sweets,made them tea with a silver kettle and _incendio_ in the common room. She was there because of the year she spent mourning. But grief, grief is for the living, and she was alive.

She spent her summer afternoons at the Leaky Cauldron,first as a costumer,and then as a waitress,and,after Tom retired,as the owner. One day, Neville came in with a Dittany and stutter,and reminded her how she had always loved both herbology and healing.He got as red as his Remembral and asked her out on a date,discovered how home could be someone's arms and not a place. Hannah,in a hospital room,standing in front of Frank and Alice Longbottom, holding Neville's sweaty palm,trying to not seem as nervous as she feels,letting out a relieved sight when Alice presses a gum wrapper to her palm.

Hannah,who had always been so good at healing people,and reading people,and caring for them,who passed them ice cold mugs and steaming hot tea,who sat with scared muggleborns and told them all about Hogwarts. Hannah,who threw Neville a party when he decided to teach Herbology and not be an auror, because this was him being brave,this was him choosing to be true to himself rather than to live up to others expectations.

When Hannah heard Madam Pomfrey was thinking of retiring,she closed the pub for a day and walked to Hogwart's gates,all her books about healing in a bag hanging from her shoulder,how she left with a job offer and lessons to learn. She would learn how to heal open wounds,to mend broken bones and broken hearts,how chocolate doesn't cure all,but how it helps most.

Hannah would still dig her hands in the dirt next to the greenhouses,after all this years.

This is about burying things. This is about letting them grow.


End file.
